Find local creators

How to use it

1. 1Start with the search at the top: the city and niche boxes, under the title.
2. 2Already know who you want? Press “Already know who you want? Paste their profile” under the search. It opens the profile boxes.
3. 3The Influencers vs. ads calculator is at the bottom. It shows what a search would cost once you have seen who is near you.
4. 4Type your city and pick your niche from the list: Coffee & Bakery, Restaurant, Salon & Spa, Barbershop, Retail, or Fitness & Wellness. The list is fixed so the same search is shared between shops instead of paid for twice.
5. 5Choose YouTube or Instagram with the switch.
6. 6Read the results: audience size, whether there is a published way to reach them, and where they say they are.
7. 7Press Draft the pitch. KANJIN writes it from your shop’s name and offer.
8. 8Edit the wording once, in the box under the results. It is reused for every creator.
9. 9Press Open in mail beside a creator who publishes an address. The pitch opens in your own mail app, addressed and written. Read it, then press Send there. KANJIN marks the creator as pitched, so nobody is asked twice.
10. 10Copy the pitch into a direct message or their contact form when there is no email address.

What it does

• Instagram search: KANJIN runs a web search limited to Instagram, in English and in your country’s language. So a Taipei cafe finds people who write 咖啡廳, not travel accounts.
• It reads the follower count from each profile and shows accounts with 1,000 to 150,000 followers. Bigger accounts answer to agents, not to a cafe. Smaller ones are a person’s diary.
• Accounts whose bio says they work with businesses are shown first. An email written in the bio is picked up and filled in for you.
• Hair, barber, nails and spa searches also leave out anyone who never mentions your trade in their own name, handle or bio. Asking a search engine for bloggers brings back the town’s biggest bloggers, whatever they write about, so KANJIN drops the ones who are not about your trade and tells you how many it dropped. Hair, barber, nails and spa searches look for people who COVER the trade, not the trade itself. A search for your town and “hair” finds salons, because salons are the hair accounts in your town — and another salon is a competitor, not somebody who will bring you customers. So those four searches also ask for a blogger, a creator or a review, and an account whose name contains salon, barbershop, spa or studio is left out. Food and coffee searches are unchanged: they already come back with the right people.
• Shops are left out, not listed. A search for coffee creators in your city also finds the coffee shops of your city, because their accounts are the ones about coffee there. KANJIN drops any account whose bio gives opening hours, takes bookings, or offers delivery, and tells you how many it dropped. A creator who mentions any of those is kept: the line is drawn so a real creator is never hidden by mistake.
• A YouTube search for the same city and niche is run once a week, then shared with every shop; a search you ran before opens from the shared copy and does not count. An Instagram search is run fresh each time and its results are not kept, because our search provider’s terms do not allow keeping them on our plan. New searches are limited: 10 a shop a day, and a shared total across all shops, so the search bill stays small.
• What a search keeps: the channel name, the subscriber count and the picture, from YouTube. It is kept for a week as a current answer and for three weeks at most, then deleted. If YouTube cannot be reached the older copy is shown and labelled, but never one older than three weeks.
• Instagram results are read from a web search, not from Instagram. KANJIN never opens instagram.com from its own servers, which is why a follower count is sometimes missing: the screen says “followers not listed” rather than guessing or hiding the account.
• If the search cannot run, the screen says so and says nothing is wrong at your end. When the day’s YouTube quota is used up it says exactly that, and when it resets, because an empty screen would read as “there is nobody in your city”.
• For YouTube you are never left with nothing: if the day’s live searches are used up, or Google does not answer, the screen shows the last result this search had and says it is from an earlier day. Instagram results are not kept, so when the day’s searches are used up an Instagram search waits until tomorrow.
• YouTube search: channels found by your city and trade, with the audience size and any published way to reach them. When no email is in the description, open the channel, press “…more” under the name, then View email address, and paste it into the card.
• Both searches open on the niche that matches your trade in Settings. The YouTube box used to open on Restaurant for every shop, so a barbershop’s first search returned restaurant creators. Change it on the screen whenever you want; if your trade is Not set, pick the niche yourself.
• Until the search keys are set up on our side, the screen shows a labeled sample so you can see what a result looks like.
• Why you send it yourself: creators answer people, not platforms. A pitch from your own address, with your name at the bottom, reads as an invitation; the same words sent by an app read as one of fifty. Their reply lands in your inbox, and KANJIN never sends anything in your name.
• Pitched means the pitch was opened in your mail app. KANJIN cannot see your outbox, so it does not know whether you pressed Send there.
• Giving a creator a free visit is cheap in your own numbers. See Influencers vs. ads for the math.
• On the free plan this screen opens for real and greyed out, with the search boxes and the pitch editor on it and nothing to press. Where the results would appear there is an EXAMPLE, marked in yellow: six creators near a made-up shop — two platforms, audiences from three thousand to twenty-one, two of them with no published way to be reached — with their handles blurred, and the invitation KANJIN would draft for one of them. They are invented. They are not creators near you, and the shop in the invitation is a made-up one called Sample Shop. The calculator at the bottom still works, because it is free on every plan; while the screen is locked it runs on the made-up shop’s figures and is marked EXAMPLE too, rather than telling you it cannot compare anything until you fill in your own. From 23 October 2026; until then a free shop saw a sales page here instead of the screen.
• No search is ever run for a shop that has not paid, and from 23 October 2026 a shop that has not paid is shown no creator numbers at all. The day holds about a hundred YouTube searches for the whole product, and spending one on a shop that has not paid takes it from a shop that has.

Related screens